The History of Modern Printers

Have you ever wondered where printers come from? We have only had the modern style printer since the year 1939. During this time a man named Chester Carlson invented something called electrophotography, which was a different type of printing process than we have now. It was a dry process for printing. The groups that he tried to sell his idea to were reluctant because the world already had carbon copies, so they didn't really need the technology. A company called Haloid Company of New York decided to pick up the project and funded the research. They called the electrophotography process xerography. It was during the time that the Xerox Corporation that most people are familiar with was born.

Next, there was a company called UNIVAC, who developed a huge computer. They wanted to have a good printer to go with their computer. At the time, they only had an offline printer that took too long to print and had one hundred and thirty characters for each line. They wanted to have a printer that was better than that. At the same time, the Xerox Company was working on their new printer technology.

This research took a few years, until Gary Starkweather came up with a technology for a printer that worked with a laser beam. This was the first instance of a laser printer. Butler Lampson and Ronald Ryder worked on certain aspects of the printer.

Between the two groups of people, they were able to come up with a printer they called EARS, which was an acronym for Ethernet, Alto, Research character generator, and Scanned laser output terminal. Basically, this means that there were a lot of different technologies that were involved in this printing machine. It wasn't until the late nineteen seventies that the people of the world were able to have access to this new printer. This printer could put out one hundred and twenty pages a minute, which is still pretty fast by today's standards.

Nowadays many people have these laser printers in their home, and also use ink jet printers. Both can use an ink cartridge finder to find the correct type of cartridge to use within the machine, as an ink cartridge finder ensures that one puts the right cartridge into one’s machine, avoiding the risk of damage. We have the men above to thank for the ease at which we can print today.